apology

My first year of classroom teaching was in a huge public school in Queens. I lived in a gray box of an apartment in Williamsburg (advertised as a "loft")where I shared a bathroom with grubby neighbors and had to do my dishes in the shower. In the summertime the kids in the buildings across the vacant lot would fill up an old clawfoot tub with water from the hydrant and I'd watch out my tiny, high window, standing on a rickety chair.
I got up at five to take the G to the F to get to school at 7:30 because I had no idea what I was doing. Fifth grade. 37 kids. I'd been their "poet in residence" and when their teacher went on maternity leave, for some inexplicable reason the principal asked me to take over, and for some inexplicable reason I agreed.
Of course it was awful. I didn't know how to teach math, I read poems all day to keep them interested, I didn't know that setting limits is a good thing, they'd get loud, I'd get overwhelmed.
There was a Puerto Rican kid named Bryan who was obsessed with Tito Puente and would drum on his desk all day long. "I'm going to be just like him," he'd tell me. I'd ask him to please stop. He'd try, he really would. He had such a sweet, distracted expression. At the tail end of a particularly hard day, I lost it. Yelled so hard at Bryan my voice cracked. He stopped drumming. Looked so surprised. Quietly started crying. The mean kid in the back laughed. I yelled at him too but he didn't care. Bryan cried quietly until the bell rang.
He's probably graduated from high school now. I hope he's got the best drum set, and I hope he's forgotten me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6fhsmVyNaw

Sleeper

Number One

Thursday, January 29

(Because it will help me pay attention. Because there is a lot to pay attention to. Because writing needn’t be so lonely, maybe.)

This morning the baby falls in and out of sleep. Her waking looks like falling – both arms suddenly outflung to catch a branch, swing herself back up. Her falling looks like sinking, her weight gathers like something liquid in my arms. Her head slides from my shoulder to collarbone, presses in. Her breaths are so tiny, little hummingbird, slight rising and falling I am learning to trust will continue even without my watching. And then a great gasp, a grumbling. Her hands at her face, her spine arched, face reddening with the stretch. And then sinking again. She sleeps like something under the sea. Her heart: that tiny machine, red engine the size (is it?) of a plum.